Max Collins - True Detective

“So where does the woman stand? With her husband or Miller?”

Eliot shrugged. “I don’t know. My guess would be she doesn’t stand at all. More like reclines.”

“For both of ’em?”

He shrugged again. “This is just rumor. But I’ve been monitoring the hoodlum squad on the police radio in my office, and after what happened with you the other day, I thought you’d find Miller’s further adventures... interesting.”

“What’s your connection?”

“You. My excuse is the bank robbery, which involves interstate transportation of a stolen vehicle. And Nydick is wanted for questioning in some Volstead-related matters.”

“You mean he drinks?”

Eliot grinned this time. “That’s what I hear.”

I shook my head and smiled. I knew it was more than just our friendship that had sparked Eliot’s interest: the mayor’s hoodlum squad was indulging itself on his turf. The cops weren’t supposed to raid Frank Nitti; Eliot Ness was supposed to raid Frank Nitti. Miller and Lang (and even yours truly) had got the kind of press thunder Eliot loved. Look how he showed up after the Nitti shooting, to ride the story’s coattails and make it into the papers.

“So you came out all right on the inquest,” Eliot said, as he weaved around streetcars and other vehicles. He wasn’t going quite fast enough to need a siren, which was a good thing, because he didn’t have one. He did have credentials in his billfold with the name Eliot Ness on them, which was one of the few ways in Chicago to get out of a speeding ticket without handing over a couple of bucks to the traffic cop.

“Yeah,” I said. “All clear.”

“Listen,” he said. Quietly. “You don’t have to tell me what went on in there. At the Wacker-LaSalle, I mean. You don’t have to explain.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Your turning your badge in is enough explanation,” he added.

But it was clear he wanted one, and since even speeding through traffic we were still a good twenty minutes away from the Park Row Hotel, I told him what had really happened. And I told him about my arrangement with Cermak, and my meeting with Nitti, too. I left out Nitti’s condescending remarks about him.

“This is all off the record, Eliot.”

He nodded, sighed heavily, passing a truck that might have been hauling beer.

“It took guts to turn down the hoodlum squad post,” he said. “It paid good over the table, let alone under. But I’m glad you quit... even though you were one of the few contacts I had on the department I could trust.”

“For a Chicago cop,” I said, “I was honest. Which means anywhere else, I’d be in for twenty years.”

“Thirty. Did you see what the Crime Lab made out of the note Nitti tried to eat?”

It had been in the papers.

“Yeah,” I said. “It sounded like a grocery list... ‘call Billy for dinner’... ‘potatoes’... I think it was just notes he’d made for himself on any sort of mundane matters, which he scribbled a bet on and had to eat.”

“The chief of detectives says it’s an underworld code,” Eliot said with a straight face.

I looked at him with a straight face, and we both started laughing.

“You know,” I said, “Cermak and company can’t be sleeping too good, with Nitti alive and well.”

“I think you’re right. Did you see the News tonight?”

“No.”

“Cermak gave a speech about driving the gangsters out of the city” — he paused for the punch line — “then he left for Florida.”

We were only a couple blocks away now, driving through a shopping district.

Eliot, suddenly serious, said, “About that guy you shot... I know it’s bothering you. I’ve shot men myself, and I think I know how you feel. I know I hope never to kill anybody or anything again. But you were in a position where it couldn’t be helped. Just let go of it, Nate, and be glad you’re a private citizen again.”

There was silence, as the Park Row loomed up on the right, its blue-and-red neon sign glowing. It was a big brick building squeezed into the middle of a block like a fat lady in a movie-house seat.

“I’ll be glad to help you get set up as a private cop,” Eliot said as he pulled over to the curb, half a block from the hotel. “I used to work as an investigator for a retail credit company, you know. I can get you some work.”

We got out of the Ford and headed for the front door. I stopped him and looked into gray eyes that were kind, even a little innocent. I said, “They say a guy’s rich when he’s got one good friend. With you and Barney on my side, I’m rolling in it.”

He smiled, looked away self-consciously toward the hotel entrance, and said, “Let’s go see what the mayor’s top men are up to.”

Across the modest lobby of this primarily residential hotel was the check-in desk, behind which was a switchboard, where a sandy-haired woman of about forty-five wore a purple-and-white floral dress and a harried expression.

“Are you more police?” the woman wanted to know.

Eliot nodded, flashed her his credentials, which she looked at but didn’t read.

“That fat creep held me down here at gunpoint ,” she said, voice trembling, holding a fist up, “like I was a criminal .”

Her indignation seemed righteous: she looked like somebody’s mother. She probably was.

“What do you mean?” Eliot said.

“They asked to see Mr. Long. Five officers. I told them room three-sixty-one. The fat one with the thick glasses sent the others upstairs and said he’d stay down and watch me so that I couldn’t warn Mr. Long. And then he held a gun on me!”

Eliot shot me a quick, disgusted look.

“They’re still up there?” he asked.

“Yes,” the woman said. “One of the other officers came down, and said, ‘We got him.’ And then he went up, too.”

“When was this?”

“A couple minutes before you came in, detective.”

We took the elevator up to the third floor. A man in a brown rumpled suit and brown hat stood in the hallway, gun in hand, guarding a dowdily attractive woman in her thirties in a blue-and-white-pattern dress, and a boy in a blue-and-red-striped sweater who was maybe twelve. The boy was quite understandably confused, looking all about him, looking at the cop, looking at his mother, the mother staring off into space, a somber, somehow resigned look on her face.

We had just reached them when we heard the shots.

Three of them, each on the other’s heels.

The woman’s composure broke; she screamed “No!” and the cop restrained her, and the kid hung onto her, afraid.

“What do you think you’re doing?” the cop said as we moved by, pointing the gun toward Eliot, who flashed his credentials at the guy.

“I’m Eliot Ness. And I’m going in that room.” He pointed to the room with the number 361 on it, across from where we stood. He didn’t have to say, Care to try to stop me? I doubt the cop would have, even if he didn’t already have his hands full with the woman and boy.

Eliot put his credentials away and took his gun out and opened the door.

A man was sprawled on his stomach over by a far window; nearby there was a chair, a calendar on the wall, a dresser with an open drawer. On the dresser, a scrawny two-foot-tall Christmas tree roped with tinsel sat in a little green wooden stand that looked to be homemade. The man was bleeding; there were three entry wounds in his back, three bloody scorched bulletholes against the pale yellow of his shirt. If this guy wasn’t dead or about to be, I was the Marx Brothers.

Speaking of comedy, Miller was standing over the apparent corpse with a gun in his hand; smoke trailed out the barrel like a ghost.